Category Archives: Politics

Hate

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We picked up a copy of The Southern Poverty Law Center’s The Year in Hate & Extremism 2021 the other day. It lists, state-by-state the groups it considers to be hate and extremist organizations.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 as a civil rights and public interest litigation organization. It has become known for filing suits against white supremacist organizations and other discriminatory groups. It promotes tolerance education programs.

Some of those the conference has listed have criticized the listings as being politically-motivated or not warranted or so broad they are not accurate.

There are thirty Missouri organizations on the 2021 list.  Thirty out of 733 hate groups spread throughout the 50 states.  Nineteen of Missouri’s thirty groups are “general hate” (10) and “general antigovernment” (9).

We have no active KKK, racial Skinhead, neo-confederate, anti-immigrant, anti LGBTQ, conspiracy proponent or constitutional sheriffs organizations.

This does not mean, of course, that there are not those who fall into those categories as individuals or that these movements have not infiltrated mainstream politics, society, and religion. Clearly there are many people who have bought into the ideology of these groups. The SPLC singles out one political philosophy in particular.

The storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 exposed an alarming reality: that extremist leaders can mobilize large groups of Americans to use force and intimidation to impose their political will…They’ve coalesced into a political movement that is now one of the most powerful forces shaping politics in the United States….Within the GOP, a radical faction is attempting to rout the few remaining moderates unless there is a robust counter-effort from democracy supporters.

Let’s be clear.  The SPLC is not saying every Republican is within this sphere. We know many who are not.  But many of these groups or those individuals buying into their rhetoric see that party as their best vehicle to achieve power and they see the upcoming midterm elections as their best road to the top.

Just as it took a record involvement of Democrat, Independent, and disaffected Republicans to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, so it is likely to take a record forceful involvement of mainline Republicans (along with some Independents and crossover Democrats) in the August primary and the November general elections to blunt this movement in Missouri.

The commission warns of the danger of these groups and those supporting their attitudes.

Extremist groups have also found ways to insert themselves into mainstream politics. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, they shifted their efforts to local politics, focusing especially on COVID safety protocols and school curricula. Hard-right organizations disrupted school board and city council meetings around the country and, in the process, created space for more extreme and bigoted voices. As a result, public servants have experienced a wave of threats that will likely continue as the country heads toward the 2022 midterms.

We have talked to many people who shake their heads, unable to understand why some office-holders and candidates who have seemed thoughtful and reasonable people until now are sounding as unreasonable as several seem to be—or either side of the ballot.

The mainstream citizens, the ones who shake their heads is despair at what our politics have become, must be vigilant and active in 2022. Sitting back and wringing their hands is not an option.

The Southern Poverty Law Center concludes:

The United States must…look for ways to build a more resilient democracy…Even more, a reinvigorated vision of a more inclusive democracy is necessary, ne that creates a stark alternative away from the destructive path of the hard right. That means expanding and protecting access to voting, creating legislation to protect people who face discrimination, promoting civics education and teaching students an anti-racist curriculum, and ensuring all Americans have healthcare, housing and other vital services so they can lead safe and dignified lives.  History tells us that the threat is real, but it also reminds us that we can turn the tide.

Some of this language can be dismissed easily as “hard left” language and in the poisoned atmosphere of our politics today it is easy to dismiss it instead of exploring it.

Our state is protected by the explorers, not the fighters.  None of us should be afraid to explore even if we face the hateful charge that we are “woke,” or some other word or phrase intended to brand us as immaterial.

It is a truism that if you cannot intellectually justify your point, you can always think you win by calling someone a name, giving them a brand, assigning them to a mythical place of dismissal. Such pronouncements should be dismissed out of hand.

Getting back to where we started—

Missouri being the home to thirty groups considered hate or extremist organizations is not something to be proud of. Letting them or individuals sharing their views dominate our political discourse is a danger to all of us no matter what side of the aisle we are on.

A silent majority can become a silenced majority if it is afraid to assert its power against those bent on destruction and control.

Perhaps naively, we place our hope in that silent majority, that silent courageous majority, that we hope is quietly waiting to turn itself loose on our election days in 2022.

 

Abdicating Authority

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The Senate Appropriations Committee has sent a House-passed bill on sports wagering to the floor for debate.  The bill taxes proceeds from sports wagering at eight percent rather than the 21 percent rate for all other forms of gambling.  Committee Chairman Dan Hegeman says there will be a substitute bill offered on the Senate floor that changes some of the provisions of the House bill.

I could have opposed this bill when it was before the committee a couple of weeks ago but decided not to do it because I’ve told this committee and House committees for about three years why the legislation written by the casino industry should be rejected—-because it does nothing or almost nothing for the state’s interests and, in fact undermines them.

The worst thing the bill proposes—so far—is a series of deductions from the taxes the casinos will pay the state.  The goal, plainly stated in the bill, is to let casino accountants turn profitable days into unprofitable days and then to carry over any paper losses to the next day’s calculations. And if the accountants can show enough days were losers, then an entire month will have no revenues that can be taxed.

This is what I told the committee—with some editorial modifications because this is a column not testimony.

First: The fiscal note on this bill talks about how much the state will gain, which isn’t much, but it does not talk about how much the state will lose because of the ultra-low tax rate proposed and other factors in the bill.  Eight percent of nothing is the same as 21% of nothing, and “nothing” is the goal.

The other two points unfortunately are combined.

This not only is the thirtieth anniversary year of the vote to legalize casino gambling, it also is the thirtieth anniversary of approval of term limits.  This legislation represents an unfortunate combination of these two issues.

We have seen the realization of two important things that critics warned would happen if term limits were adopted.

One was that imposition of term limits would eliminate the institutional memory of the General Assembly.

Institutional memory is passed along by the Elders in any society to newcomers.  It consists not only of previous experiences in what works and what does not. In the legislature’s case, it was a matter of teaching new members about traditions, practices, rules (written and unwritten), and behaviors that are essential to good governing.

It is a matter of understanding why people are “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” in the House and why the phrase, “Everyone is a Senator” is vital to the operations of the Senate.  Both standards are matters of respect and based on the idea that policy is shaped by debate among equals.  A debate between two gentlemen, two ladies, or a lady and a gentleman is a debate between equals. It is a matter of parliamentary discipline and political respect regardless of party, geography, color, gender, faith or any other factor.

“Everyone is a senator” is the same.  Senators debate Senators.  It is not us-versus-them.  Senator-to-Senator does not infer that one is superior to the other.

Institutional memory used to teach respect for the understanding that today’s opponent likely will need to be tomorrow’s friend. It was a system that worked for about 175 of Missouri’s 200 years. The sad result of the loss of that memory has been played out in the Senate this year.

The third warning we heard is that after institutional memory is gone, the General Assembly would lose the structure that protects its role as the people’s policy-maker.  Without that structure, without that discipline—critics warned—the power to make policy shifts to two elements that are permanent parts of government outside the chambers—the bureaucracy and the lobbyists.

The warning was that while legislators will come and go, both the bureaucracy and the lobbyists are permanent and their power grows.  And so it is with this bill.

In the last five years, the gaming industry has given legislators 29 bills on sports wagering with the expectation those bills will be passed.  In these five years, not one member of the House and the Senate—I haven’t counted but probably 230 or more people have served in either chamber during that time—not one member of the House or the Senate has independently introduced a bill that puts the General Assembly in charge of this issue.

Not one bill has been written by any member of the Missouri Legislature that legalizes sports wagering on the state’s terms, that asserts the General Assembly’s authority to act on behalf of the people who elected its members. 

And so the warnings from 1992 have come sadly true.  For five years the Missouri General Assembly has abdicated its authority—on this issue—to those who are not physically Ladies, Gentlemen, or Senators, none of whom have any responsibility for, or obligation to the people who sent you here.

And that is why you are being asked by backers of this bill to tell the people who sent you here that it is okay with you if your veterans continue to see declines in financing for their nursing homes, why it is okay with you if the state’s promise of education funding from casino gambling is broken, why it is okay with you if the cities some of you represent that play host to casinos will continue to lose thousands and millions of dollars every year because the gambling industry tells you not to update outdated laws.

It’s not too late to regain control of the process. Committee or floor substitutes, or committee or floor amendments can do it.

But the industry doesn’t want you to do it.  So you have a choice.

When you go home on the evening of May 13th and you have coffee the next morning with some constituents and one asks if you did anything good here this year—what will you say?

—that you stood up for your teachers and your veterans and your home dock cities…..

Or will you say, “I voted to let you bet on a baseball game tonight.”

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Time is running short and pressure to pass what the industry wants in this election year is likely to increase. Now we will learn if the legislature has the spine to act on behalf of the people they meet at home or whether they’ll go with the people they meet in the Capitol halls.

We hope the teachers and the veterans and the college kids looking for state scholarship help, or the city leaders of towns with casinos—and even families of those who become addicted to this industry’s product—ask in these weeks before the election whether their legislator abdicated policy-making power to the people in the halls.

Reductio ad absurdum

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The life of retirement on this quiet street provides an opportunity for time to reflect on some of the great political thinking of our times as well as some of the not-so-great ideas. State legislators can be counted on as great thought-fodder producers. They’ll be back in the big-time fodder-manufacturing business in about, hmmmm, ten weeks.  Personal experience has led to the observation that selective self-righteousness always produces fodder. The quality of the fodder sometimes can be measured by a Latin phrase.

Latin does not often spring to the mind of the journalist, but we recall that the introduction of a couple of proposals during the 2015 legislature sent us scurrying to our source for Latin expressions.  It was the first session in which we were not present to subtly suggest some ideas were bereft of intelligence.

One proposal could have eliminated the sales tax that provides the bulk of funds for the Missouri Department of Conservation.  The department wanted to know where the state would find the $110 million dollars to pay many department’s bills if voters kill the tax. The representative didn’t have an answer to that question.

On the other side of the rotunda, a senator wanted to eliminate hunting and fishing permits because, he said, Missourians already pay the conservation sales tax and charging a fee to hunt the critters the conservation sales tax provides habitat for is double taxation.  That’s another $40 million dollars the department would not have so it can pay for all of the stuff it does.

Neither of these fellows suggested how the department could continue to function if it lost $150 million dollars a year, about 85% of its funding.  And if you think the legislature would look very hard for a new funding source, you don’t have a clue about the ideology of the legislative majority.

For example, the legislature started fiscal year 2014-2015 more than $400 million short of the amount it promised public schools they’d be getting by then under the school funding formula.  Do you really think a legislature that lacks interest in meeting its responsibility to pay for the education of Missouri’s children would show any great interest in finding new money to take care of deer, turkeys, otters, elk, prairie chickens, trout, bats, hellbenders, glades, and what little prairie there is left in Missouri?

The legislature solved the problem of funding shortages for education.  It rewrote the formula to reduce its responsibility.

We think the Latin phrase that tops our discussion today means “reduction to absurdity,” a concept that goes back to the great Greek seekers of logical thought who tested the truth of an  argument by seeing if it remained valid when extended to the point of absurdity.

The representative who wanted an end to the conservation sales tax said it’s not “good politics” to have a funding source “that never has an end to it.”  He wanted a statewide vote on whether to continue it.

Hmmmm.   Let’s extend his argument. Had he thought of a proposal for a statewide vote on the income tax?   The state sales tax?  The cigarette tax?   The alcoholic beverage tax?  Since the Farm Bureau jumped to support his bill back then, we wondered if the same standard should apply to the soil conservation and state parks sales tax. Those taxes don’t seem to have any ends either.

There were all kinds of opportunities for “good politics” then.  And if we listen to our legislators who continue to argue that lower taxes will mean more businesses will come to Missouri and create all kinds of new jobs, the expansion of the “good politics” plan could create a business development expansion that would make the Oklahoma Land Rush look like a small-town homecoming parade.

Now, let’s look at the senator’s double taxation argument.  There are all kinds of double taxation that also should be eliminated under his reasoning. We pay a sales tax for the opportunity to own our cars and our trucks and our snowmobiles and our wave runners.  But then we pay a second tax so we can stick a license plate on the front and the rear of the things, or put decals on the side.  And then we have to pay a third tax if we want to put fuel in them. And property taxes, don’t forget them. Forget double taxation.  We’re talking about QUADRUPLE taxation!!!

We pay property taxes that help finance our public schools and universities.  But then we have to pay laboratory fees, sports fees, band fees—and we have to pay to buy or rent textbooks so our children can learn something in the schools we’ve already paid taxes to support, sometimes higher taxes because the legislature continues to refuse to meet its self-imposed obligations. Clearly, those who use our schools are being taxed every bit as unfairly as the people with guns and bows and arrows are being taxed (don’t forget the sales taxes they paid to buy those things) to use the woods where the deer and the turkey play.

We pay taxes to finance our court systems at the county level.  And then we pay additional tax after tax after tax hidden behind the phrase “court fees” for various and sundry parts of the judicial system.  People who make mistakes that put them in court are being double-taxed. In fact, they’re being taxed in multiples, not just as a double tax.

There are astonishing possibilities for even more “good government” in other categories we haven’t touched on here.

The Representative withdrew his proposal fairly soon after introducing it after publicity about it raised big questions about the devastation it would cause. The Senator’s bill underwent major modification and was reduced to something that applied only to people living outside Missouri but who owned at least 75 acres here, which doesn’t exactly peg the logic meter.

We realize it’s never fair to criticize the efforts of others if the critic has no alternatives to offer.  In that spirit is a suggestion that lawmakers should avoid such pennyy-ante tax and fee proposals and focus on a broader “good government” system that lets taxpayers decide how to spend their money—because as we have often heard some legislators say, the taxpayers know how to spend their money better than government does. For example:

—-A law that designates each month as “pledge month” for certain government programs and services.  Let Missourians phone in amounts they would pledge for those services.   January could be Department of Natural Resources and Department of Public Safety Pledge Month.  February could be Department of Transportation and Department of Agriculture Pledge Month.  And so it would go.  We could eliminate an entire large state agency under this plan and that would make advocates of smaller government ecstatic.   We wouldn’t need a Department of Revenue any more. We could set up a smaller Office of Pledge Compliance and save a bundle.

We wonder how things would go for Legislature and Elected Statewide Officials Pledge Month.

Or perhaps we could have a statewide car wash for the Highway Patrol weekend.  A Statewide Social Services Bake Sale weekend.  A statewide garage sale for Mental Health.

Take a Conservation Agent to Lunch Day at the venison chili parish picnic.

See, folks, all the great thinking is not exclusive to legislative chambers when it comes to tax policy.  Any of us can think of things those people think about.

 

 

 

 

A Reason to Still Like Ike

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Here’s a piece of trivia for you that we learned years ago while touring the boyhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas:

He was born David Dwight Eisenhower.  His father’s name was David, too, so his mother reversed the first two names to avoid having two Davids in the family.

At the end of World War II, President Truman told him, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”  Eisenhower called the idea “an astounding proposition”   that he treated as a “splendid joke, which I hoped it was.”  He laughed it off and told Truman that he would not run for president in ’48.

The incident is recounted in Eisenhower’s 1948 book, Crusade in Europe, his view of the European War.  You might find his last few paragraphs something to reflect on in our current times:

Volumes have been, and more volumes will be, written on the collapse of world co-operation and the true significance of the events that accompanied the tragedy.  For us, all their words will amplify one simple truth.  Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession—to defend it against every thrust from within or without.

Eisenhower warned against any signs of military weakness (as Churchill did in Fulton in 1946) but he felt “Military preparedness alone is an inadequate answer to the problem.” And nationalism isn’t either.  In a time long before Russian hacking, Eisenhower wrote:

Communism inspires and enables its militant preachers to exploit injustices and inequity among men. This ideology appeals, not to the Italian or Frenchman or South Americans as such, but to men as human beings who become desperate in the attempt to satisfy common human needs. Therein it possesses a profound power for expansion. Wherever popular discontent is founded on group oppression or mass poverty or the hunger of children, there Communism may stage an offensive that arms cannot counter.  Discontent can be fanned into revolution, and revolution into social chaos. The sequel is dictatorial rule. Against such tactics exclusive reliance on military might is vain.

The areas in which freedom flourishes will continue to shrink unless the supporters of democracy match Communist fanaticism with clear and common understanding that the freedom of men is at stake; meet Communist-regimented unity with the voluntary unity of common purpose, even though this may mean a sacrifice of some measure of nationalistic pretensions; and above all, annul Communist appeals to the hungry, the poor, the oppressed, with practical measures untiringly prosecuted for the elimination of social and economic evils that set men against men.

As a world force, democracy is supported by nations that too much and too often act alone, each for itself alone. Nowhere perfect, in many regions democracy is pitifully weak because the separation of national sovereignty uselessly prevents the logical pooling of resources, which would produce greater material prosperity within and multiplied strength for defense..

The democracies must learn that the world is too small for the rigid concepts of national sovereignty that developed in a time when the nations were self-sufficient and self-dependent for their own well-being and safety. None of them today can stand alone. No radical surrender of national sovereignty is required—only a firm agreement that in disputes between nations a central and joint agency, after examination of the facts, shall decide the justice of the case by majority decision. This is a slight restriction indeed on nationalism and a small price to pay if thereby the people who stand for human liberty are better fitted to settle dissension with their own ranks or to meeting attack from within.

We believe individual liberty, rooted in human dignity, is man’s greatest treasure. We believe that men, given free expression of their will, prefer freedom and self-dependence to dictatorship and collectivism.  From the evidence, it would appear that the Communistic leaders also believe this; else why do they attack and attempt to destroy the practice of these concepts…

If the men and women of America face this issue as squarely and bravely as their soldiers faced the terrors of battle in World War II, we would have no fear of the outcome. If they will unite themselves as firmly as they did when they provided, with their Allies in Europe, the mightiest fighting force of all time, there is no temporal power that can dare challenge them.  If they can retain the moral integrity, the clarity of comprehension, and the readiness to sacrifice that finally crushed the Axis, then the free world will live and prosper, and all peoples, eventually, will reach a level of culture, contentment, and security that has never before been achieved.

It might seem to some that Eisenhower’s seventy-year old message today would be “Make the WORLD great again.”

The Hypocrisy of Term Limits

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Sometimes we write stuff here that won’t move the public needle but we do it to get something off our chest and into whatever public discussion flows from these pieces.  Truth be told, these columns have limited readership and since I don’t mess with Facebook or other social media platforms (I have a life and it is not lived between my thumbs), this wisdom reaches only a few feet from the mountaintop from which it is dispensed.

But today, we need to expose term limits for the hypocritical entity that they are. And the hypocrisy that voters showed in approving them thirty years ago this year.

We related some of the problems a few days ago.  There are two major points today, one that can be made in just a few words and the second one that will take a little more. The point, however, is the same—term limits are voter apathy and voter hypocrisy at their worst:

The first point is one we’ve made before—that voters gave up their right to vote for the people who represent them in the legislative chambers when they adopted a law saying they did not want the right to vote their state representative a fifth term or their state senator a third term.

They just threw away their votes.

Voters said we must have term limits to get new, fresh blood into our governments—-and then immediately contradicted themselves.

The same voters who approved limiting Missouri House members to only four two-year terms voted in the same election to return 53 members to the House of Representatives for a fifth term.

Of that 53, four were returned for their ninth term, one for a tenth term, two for their eleventh term and one for his SEVENTEENTH term.

Two years later, Missourians voted for 36 of these same people for still another term and gave fourteen others a fifth term or more.

And in 1996 voters sent 22 of them back again! And they gave 13 representatives fifth terms.

The last person affected by term limits to serve in the House of Representatives, as far as we have been able to determine, was Chris Kelly of Columbia, who was elected to his ninth and last term in 2012 after having been away from the House for several years.  He could have run for a tenth term but did not.

In all, Missouri voters who think term limits are good public policy have voted 263 times to elect state representatives to a fifth term (one was elected to a 19th during this time).

The Missouri Senate, a much smaller body, has seen voters send its members back for more than two terms 32 times.

That’s almost 300 times for both chambers of our legislature. .

And what does that say?

It says that if voters have a chance to vote for someone they like, they’ll do it.  But those voters of 1992 decided you and I won’t have that opportunity.

The second point is that term limits miss the target.  The real issue is POWER.  Instead, term limits cripples SERVICE.  The most dangerous people in our political system are the people in power.  They set the agendas.  They decide what legislation will be heard in committees or debated on the floors of the House and the Senate. They are in positions that attract financial support that hey might wish to share with a favored few.

Terms limits can be, should be, applied to those who can manipulate the system.  Speakers and Presidents Pro Tem have the power. The Governor and the Treasurer have policy and financial power in state government and limiting that power is a safeguard as would be limiting the years a person can lead a legislative body.

There is no doubt that incumbency has its advantages at campaign times.  But the answer to that advantage is not in taking away the right to vote for that person again instead of for an opponent. It is in making challengers more equal in presenting their cases.  Reforming the way campaigns are financed is an answer. The challenge is in finding a constitutional way to do it.

One way to start is to change term limits laws to apply to those in power and to restore the citizens’ right to pick their public servants.

Will voters reclaim their right?  In today’s political climate, it’s extremely doubtful regardless of how much we owe it to ourselves as voters and our system to do it.

There are people who are dying today to keep their version of democracy alive.  We smug Americans who too readily wrap ourselves in our flag and use it to justify all kinds of dubious remarks and actions cannot fully appreciate  how desperately millions of others want to hang on to something we regard so casually and irresponsibly and are willing to give away with so little thought.

But term limits are what we have and that’s what we are thirty years after Missourians gave away their right to vote for those speaking for them in the chambers where our laws are made.

PQ 

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The PQ is more formally known in parliamentary circles as the Previous Question.  Moving the previous question forces an immediate vote on whether debate should continue.  If the motion passes, a vote is immediately taken on the issue.

It’s a maneuver intended to stop endless debate that is leading to nothing productive. It has never been used, in your observer’s experience, by the party in power against a member of its own party.

But when endless debate within the majority party impedes productivity, the PQ against a member or members of the majority can become a matter of enforcing discipline.

The filibuster was rare and so was the previous question for most of the legislature’s history.  Both are internal disciplinary matters that have lost their value because of their abuse, one by excessive and unchecked use and the other by partisan practice.

Both are tools for advancement of the governmental process if they are respected as such.  Clearly, the filibuster has become a punitive tool abused by those who believe their actions will not be challenged by their own majority party.

In recent years the previous question has been used as a punitive step by the majority to avoid reconciliation and compromise with minority concerns.

The disrespect of the legitimate purposes of both has weakened respect for equals in the Senate chamber and has impeded progress in public policy.

Given conditions in the Senate this year, this seems to be the time for the majority party to use the previous question on some of its own members.

Such a departure from custom will send a strong message that there will be discipline in the Senate that allows the lawmaking process to progress.

Filibusters have had one of two results:

First, the majority side realized that time is exceedingly valuable and the only way to preserve it for important work is to reach sufficient compromise on an issue that the disagreeing parties will agree on a half-loaf that is better than no loaf at all. The lawmaking process advances, leaving continuation of a disagreement for another day—and another compromise.

Second, the minority party is able to either achieve enough of their points to step back from the confrontation, or no compromise is possible but the minority position will have a chance to be heard before other business can be brought up, eliminating the need to use the previous question.

In both cases, the purpose of the filibuster is respected.  The dignity of the Senate as a great deliberative body is protected.  And the concept that “everybody is a senator” is honored.

Allowing the filibuster to be abused creates a climate of disrespect that impedes public policy progress.  So does overzealous use of the previous question.  But judicious use of both retains a balance of discipline within the system.

And using it, even on a member of the controlling party, to restore Senate discipline seems to be a worthwhile step to take, especially if the purpose behind the motion is made abundantly clear to both sides.  It is likely there will be heated criticism from those who have locked down the Senate repeatedly for the first two months of this session but it is possible that most of the Senate membership will appreciate the message that our system of government is supported by a discipline of common respect among members.

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Jurassic government

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How many times will we hear the cheap, vague, promise to “fight big government” in this campaign year.  Candidates pressed by their voters—and the voters need to do this is great intensity—might come up with a statement that equally cheap and vague.

We’ve run into someone who actually thinks about that. He’s also realistic about what needs to happen—and what realistically can NOT happen,

Maybe he’s just whistling in the wind, but Professor Donald Kettl is suggesting the push toward smaller government is counterproductive.  He’s not arguing for bigger government but he does argue that there is an alternative to the philosophy that cutting “the size” of government is the silver bullet that will solve government’s problems.

Kettl is a former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, one of the most prominent think tanks in Washington.  It calls itself non-partisan although media reports put it barely on the left side of the liberal-conservative scale (53 on a scale of 100).  Regardless of where you fall on that scale, his observations are worth evaluating.

Unlike many who rail against “big government” or proclaim government is “too big,” Kettl puts some serious thought behind what his contentions.

Kettle begins his 2016 book, Escaping Jurassic Government, with an observation partisans on both side of the government aisle seem to agree on: “There is a large and growing gap in American government, between what people expect government to do and what government can actually accomplish.”   Government, he offers, comes out poorly when the public compares what it can do with what the private sector does, an image worsened by the cynical “and sometimes nasty view” expressed through social media.

But he points to the contradictory nature of the public’s attitude toward government when he speaks of “citizens’ rising—and sometimes impossible—expectations about what government ought to do for them,” and continues, “No matter the issue, the first instinct when problems arise, even among the biggest advocates for smaller government, is to see government as the cavalry and wonder why it doesn’t arrive faster to help save the day….Almost no one likes big government, but no one expects to have to cope with problems alone.”

The result is what he calls Jurassic government.  “Like the dinosaurs, government is strong and powerful. But like the forces that led the dinosaurs to extinction, government is failing to adapt to the challenges it faces. American government struggles with its most important and fundamental decisions. Even worse, it too often fails to deliver on the decisions it makes. That wastes scarce public money and leaves citizens disappointed,” he writes.

How did we get here?   It’s simple, he says.  This country has lost its commitment to competence in government.  And he argues that competence cannot be restored simply by cutting funding for programs and agencies.

His book focuses on the federal government.  But the points it makes apply, too, to state government.  The goal, he says, is competence, not necessarily size.  “We need to restore government’s capacity to deliver on what we decide as a country we ought to accomplish…We do have it within our grasp to restore confidence that what the government seeks to do it will do well.”   But it won’t be easy.

Kettl notes that the growth of government has been a bipartisan affair—Democrats creating three and turning one into two.  Republicans have created three new departments and have reduced one (Nixon kicked the Post Office out of the cabinet).  But in terms of the thirty-two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has has fewer government employees as a share of the national workforce than the average among the OECD countries).  It might be surprising to realize that only one in eight federal bureaucrats work for the federal government.  Government spending as a share of the economy  is less than the average spending of those 32 nations.  Kettl says government employment has been flat at the state and local levels since the days of Ronald Reagan. The number of local government workers  has increased, however, as population has increased.

Is privatization the answer to reducing government costs? Kettl maintains it is not and, in fact, reduces accountability.  He cites several instances in which government has been criticized for failing to do its job—but it is the private contractor to whom that job has been outsourced that has failed—and accountability has suffered.

He notes the greatest increases in government costs is in entitlement programs while total government spending has stayed pretty flat.

He thinks liberals who want to increase government spending won’t get far because slow long-term economic growth will not provide much new money to pay for many initiatives.  And while conservatives want to cut government spending, most of the federal budget is consumed by payments on the national debt, entitlements, and defense spending.

At the state level, he says, the outlook is not good.  “The U. S. Government Accountability Office forecasts that state and local governments could face structural deficits for the next fifty years,” he writes.  Aging populations will put pressures on state governments while public opposition to higher taxes “make it unlikely” that state spending will grow.

The upshot of all of this, he suggests, is-–as he puts it in one of his chapter titles—“Government’s Size Can’t Change (Much),” and to condense much of the book into a line or two: cutting government’s ability to pay its bills only reduces government’s ability to do the things it is supposed to do well.

There is much, much more in Kettl’s book, a lot of it challenging traditional political rhetoric.  He thinks today’s efforts to “cut” government size actually is cutting government’s competence and it is the declining competence of government that creates a distrustful public that criticizes the government for not meeting its obligations. It seems to this reader that he is pleading for those in government as well as those who pay government’s bills and want government services to throw away the bumper stickers and to put on their thinking caps.

If you’re in government, his study is worth reading.  If you are one of those paying the taxes and taking the services, it’s worth reading, too.

The dinosaurs, he says, didn’t think about the changing world around them and move realistically to adapt.  And we know what happened to them.

We think that his thoughts are worth serious consideration whether you’re the 53 or the 47 on the liberal/conservative scale.

Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Commitment to Competence,  by Donald F. Kettl, published by Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 2016.

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Two Worlds

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The General Assembly is spending this week on its annual spring break, a few days to relax, unwind and reload. And to do a little campaigning or campaign planning perhaps.

They’re back in the real world this week.  For those who haven’t seen their other world, the differences are hard to understand.

When a member of the Missouri General Assembly steps through an entrance of the Missouri Capitol, that person is stepping into a small, confined, hot world with little respite that tends to consume even the best of people for most of the first five months of the year before it spits them back out into the world from which they came.

And they’re glad to come back seven months later to step out of their comfortable home world through those doors and back into the collision of wills, the competition of ideas, and the fight over the words yes and no.

They move from a world of service to others into a world of demands from others. And the demands are unrelenting, sometimes with consequences implied if the demands are not met.

They might be active at home on issues of poverty, food shortages, spouse and child abuse, veterans needs, church work, homelessness, and other social issues that can’t afford high-powered influence in the hot little world that is the Missouri Capitol. And as they deal in the capitol with pressures from those that can afford to apply them, it might be hard to think of their gentler work at home.

Imagine lives lived in fifteen-minute segments, each segment featuring someone who wants something, or a world of one or two-hour meetings to listen to proposals pleasing to those in the Capitol hallways, and days of increasingly long sessions arguing about the propriety of answering demands and which ones to answer.

Imagine all of this far from the comfort of home, family, friends, and co-workers with whom they share their streets, or coffee, or church pews.

It is hard to remember in those eighteen weeks or so who is more important—the people they meet on the street back home or the people they meet in the hallways of the State Capitol.

Seldom is there time or opportunity to think about things in depth, to study issues in depth, to look for pitfalls in legislation in depth. The pressure to take what they are given, often not knowing all that is within the proposition, is enormous. Sometimes the pressure squeezes out reason, leads to action counter to what is best to those back home, and demands action without burden of thought.

This is the world of unrelenting movement, of unrelenting asks and demands, a world far detached from the freedoms enjoyed where they live.

Furthermore, it’s more than consuming. It’s addictive.

Plaques on the office wall from those whose bidding they have done. Checks in the campaign account to encourage or reward a vote.  Intense seeming friendships today that disappear when the last vote is cast that can benefit a person, a group, a cause.

This is the other world of the people we send to represent us in Jefferson City. As individuals, they return home the same people.  As a group, however, in the capitol they become “government,” an enemy to many.

Is there is a way to improve this system?

Ideally, yes.  Sometimes it’s a matter of those sent to Jefferson City to show courage in the face of pressures, to question more closely the things asked of them. But sometimes it’s the case of those who vote to send others to represent them in this small stone world we call the Missouri Capitol meeting a citizen’s responsibility to pay attention to issues that are not always “my backyard” issues.

Government does not take place only in the Capitols of our country.  Its roots are in the home towns of those who are sent forth. And the folks at home need to care, to pay attention, and to hold accountable those who are to speak for them in that hot little world.

 

The Whirlwind

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This year is the thirtieth anniversary of two major decisions made by Missouri voters.  One has proven itself to be a disaster for Missouri’s political system and the other has led to proof of the fallibility of the first.

Missouri voters hypocritically approved legislative term limits with a 75 percent favorable vote on November 3, 1992.

On the same day, Missourians went 62 percent in favor of what was then called “riverboat gambling.”

These two events have become a toxic political brew in our system of government.

In today’s discussion we are going to look at term limits.  Later we will discuss casino gambling.

The Old Testament minor prophet Hosea, a contemporary of more important prophets Isaiah and Micah, warned metaphorically of the downfall of Israel for its various sins—lying, murder, idolatry, and covetousness, along with spiritual and physical adultery, these latter two characteristics personally experienced by Hosea and his wife Gomer.  Gomer carried on with another man.  The faithful Hosea accused Israel of spiritual adultery.

He warned that Israel and Judah would fall:

“They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour.”

Term limits was the wind.  We are reaping the whirlwind in the Missouri General Assembly—most particularly in the Missouri Senate.  But the term limits whirlwind is not just blowing in the Senate which heads towards its spring break at the end of this week with only one bill approved in weeks of division, derision and disrespect. It is felt less in the House where its impact is less visible because it is more controlled.

It rages in the Senate where unlimited debate among the 34 members is still considered a virtue—as it should be if members respected it more than they abuse it.  The House has rules that are necessary in a chamber of 163 members to limit the time a member may speak on an issue.

The public, which has little interest in the more subtle or arcane factors of lawmaking, bought the idea that politicians should be limited to a maximum of eight years in the House and eight in the Senate because politicians are basically—

Crooked.

—Except for their own representative or senator.  While voting to limit House members to four terms and Senate members to two terms, many of those 1992 voters were electing their Representatives and Senators to terms five or three in many districts.

The voters voted to restrict their own right to vote when they for term limits.  This year, voters in will be prohibited from considering whether five of their Senators deserve a third term. In most of those cases, those Senators will never again have the privilege of representing their citizens on the floors of the House or the Senate.  Voters in 1992, most of whom do not live in those senatorial districts, decided these five are no longer fit to serve regardless of how distinguished their work might have been.

But terms limits is more dangerous than that.

Those of us who voted in that election were warned that term limits would destroy the institutional memory that is vital to lawmaking. Senior lawmakers who knew the value of respecting the other side of the aisle, of knowing that today’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend, who understood that collegiality benefitted the people of Missouri more than hostility, disappeared.  With no one to teach newcomers the importance of legislative control of the lawmaking process, that control passed to outsiders.

I watched the first crumbling of the legislative process.  The first piece fell the first time I heard the sponsor of a bill ask a colleague offering an amendment, “Have you run this past so-and-so in the hall?,”  clearly an indication that a blessing from a lobbyist (lobbyists are not allowed within the floor of the chambers during debate) was necessary for acceptance of the amendment.

Later as cell phones became more ubiquitous, I watched debaters with their cellphone in their hands checking for text messages that influenced the debate.  Technology has put the lobbyists in the chambers.

There also have been other indications that much of the power of lawmaking has shifted from the bests interests of constituents being argued on the floors of the House and Senate to the best interests of those in the hallways being transmitted into the discussion from outside.

I watched the disappearance of lawmakers capable of amendments written by hand during the debate, replaced by pauses in debate so a legislative staff member could write what he or she was asked to write—the origin of the amendment sometimes in a text message from outside.

In the entire first half of this legislative session, only one bill has been approved by both chambers and sent to the governor. Just one.

The wind the voters sowed in 1992 is the whirlwind of 2022 and in the splintered and often dedlocked Missouri Senate, at least, (and in the Congress as well) “The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour.”

And legislative bodies—Congress and state assemblies alike—seem unwilling to prove they serve above the low regard the public has for them.

 

What to do with him

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It surely has occurred to many people watching investigations from Georgia to Washington and New York that criminal charges against former President Donald Trump are growing more possible.

There is no joy in writing that sentence or in contemplating the issue we address today.  But the issue cannot be ignored.

What is to be done if a president or a former president is charged and convicted of serious crimes?

Based on almost daily reports that a new rock is turned over and something disappointing crawls out from under it, there is no avoiding the possibility that the former leader of the free world, as we like to think of our president, could be found guilty of an offense that could mean imprisonment.

We have witnessed first-hand several public officials at the state level being sent to prison. It hasn’t been that hard to watch it happen without concern for or about them.

But if it’s a former President of the United States?

The mental image of a man whose dark suit and red or blue tie are so familiar trading those clothes for an orange jumpsuit is jarring.

If the betrayal of public trust is so severe that not even a Gerald Ford/Richard Nixon-type presidential pardon can be contemplated, where does he go?  Does he become part of the general population, even if it’s a so-called “country club prison” some think disgraced public officials occupy?

Inmates do have rights within a prison. They aren’t left in a bleak cell 24 hours a day. But what kind of cell should an ex-president occupy? A cell/suite?  Or the same kind of cell occupied by the state official doing time for campaign embezzlement?

Would he take his meals in the same room with the other inmates and at the same time—even if surrounded by guards because someone might want to become infamous by doing him (possibly fatal) harm?

Should restrictive house arrest be off the table?  Depending on the severity of the offense(s), should any be proven, should the ex-president be allowed to stay at Mar-a-Lago? Being punished by staying in the big house and not being allowed to play golf has a ludicrous aspect to it.

Should an ex-president be given a job in a prison?  Kitchen work.  Janitorial work.  Tending to the prison garden.  Mopping bathroom floors.  Working in a prison industry (making furniture for example).  Should he be allowed to attend a class and earn an associate college degree?

We know, of course, that if things get this far, thousands and perhaps millions of people will feel that the justice system is more rigged than they think the most recent presidential election was.  How should justice be meted out in the face of that kind of conspiratorial thinking that could produce widespread civil unrest?

With courage, we think.  Our court system knows it must operate despite any mob behavior.

None of this is something any of us wants to think about.

But we should.

Just in case.